


Tuesdays With Captain Sharpe

by helens78



Category: Sharpe (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M, One of My Favorites, POV First Person, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-05-17
Updated: 2005-05-17
Packaged: 2017-10-05 20:00:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/45551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helens78/pseuds/helens78
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If it's a Tuesday, and it does seem to be a Tuesday, then Captain Sharpe must be in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tuesdays With Captain Sharpe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Telesilla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telesilla/gifts), [darkrose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkrose/gifts).



If it's a Tuesday, and it does seem to be a Tuesday, then Captain Sharpe must be in love.

It's either Josefina or Teresa this time. I wonder if anyone's ever told him that love, _real_ love, isn't so fickle as to leave a man heart-strung over one lass while he pines for a second, grieves a third, pursues a fourth and forgets a fifth, but then I suppose the bastard would say he isn't fickle, only lucky.

And maybe he'd be right. He doesn't forget it when he falls in love. He just doesn't close his heart off to the next fine pair of ankles to come along. And if he falls in love faster than an army widow, then so it is. He'd tell me it's the only way he's ever seen, the only one he's ever known, and he'd be telling it true. It's that and the love you can buy for a shilling a go and what else, he'd say, is there?

Well, says I, or say I would if he were of a mind to hear it, there's the love among soldiers, the kind of love that speaks to friendship and honor (our Sharpe, he's a fair one for honor when it suits him) and a man you'd lay down your life for, and that, I'd say, is love worth knowing.

Only I wouldn't say it because he'd give me that grin and raise an eyebrow and stick his tongue in his cheek and say, aye, Pat, true enough. And I'd likely have to stalk off so I wouldn't try and swing at him. An officer, he is. Might get me the lash if anyone saw.

Get us worse than the lash if anyone knew what that tongue-in-cheek grin would mean, and it's a lucky thing they don't as the army says it hangs men for sodomy. The army's full of two-faced, lying, serpent-tongued sons of goats, but then the army's full of the English, which is more or less the same thing, and in either case I've seen men kick the barrels out from so-called sodomites' feet who've taken a free hand in the dark from a fellow soldier more than once themselves.

And with Captain Sharpe it's a good deal more than a free hand, and it's glad I am for it. He's got a fine mouth and a fine strong back and a fierceness to him that no lass I've ever known could equal. It's his hands most often, sure, but then there's the nights I lie with him and press myself along the back of him, and I think to myself every time, _Patty Harper, you're a fool to say you know what love is at all, if this is what you make of it._

Why shouldn't it be that, I'd like to know. Why shouldn't love come when you've seen a man fevered and sure his final days were here? Why shouldn't it come when you've stood side by side with a man, watched him face down numbers that would make any other man piss himself, and seen him come out the other end of it? Why shouldn't it come when he's risked his life day in and day out for you, when you'd do the same for him, when you know his heart and his mind like you know your own and you've heard the things he dreams of?

I'd be a liar to say the rutting has nothing to do with it, of course. Sure and it does; it makes me weak for him in a way I'm weak for no one else. And strong for him in a way I'm strong for no one else. I dream of days when the war is over and he comes to visit me in Talavera and I show him what it is to take a lover in the grass when summer's so new you can smell it. And I fight for the dream.

So help me God, Captain, if I never hear you've fallen for another lass it'll be too soon. I wonder where those words are for me in the dark. When it'll be me who says _I love you, Dick_ and gets _I love you, Pat_ in return.

It won't be ever, I know. The world doesn't work that way. But it should. It bloody well should.

So it's Tuesday and Captain Sharpe's in love again. I guess that's my cue to smile. I'll joke and he'll snarl and I wonder, Dick, if you're snarling because you know I'm jealous or because I do such an expert job of appearing as if I'm not.

_-end-_


End file.
